This week's featured local by-election: Tuffley

We're heading to Gloucestershire this week for a Tory held seat in the Tuffley ward on Gloucester City Council.

This one is happening because of the death of a Conservative councillor who had represented the ward for twelve years. He topped the poll when the ward was last contested at the May 2021 local elections.

Gloucester City Council elections May 2021

So, the average vote share was:

48% Conservative
35% Labour
11% Independent
6% Lib Dem

No indy candidate this time and Labour need just a 6.8% swing to gain the seat. As a comparison, they achieved an 18% swing to win a ward in Shropshire from the Tories last week. Their candidate is Tracy Millard who was the party's top candidate last year. The result on Thursday won't shift anything in terms of power on Gloucester Council where the current standings are 23 Cons - 11 LD - 3 Lab - 1 Ind.

GloucestershireLive has a nice round up of the three candidates and reveals one potential local issue which might play a part; a planned housing development down the road with 3,000 new homes proposed (according to the Conservative candidate). Twitter reveals that there's plenty of campaigning going on for Labour, but harder to find evidence for Tory activity (although not every council candidate bothers with social media).

Gloucester itself is target seat #114 for Labour in a general election, which would put them as the clear largest party but just shy of an overall majority. Winning council seats in the constituency is always a help - Labour were the biggest party on the council up until 2002 and held the Westminster seat from 1997 until 2010.

This should be an easy pickup for Labour given the huge national polling shift towards them since the government's mini-budget. Of course, it doesn't always work like that in these by-elections, but unless the Tory candidate can really motivate the NIMBY vote, her chances of holding the seat look slim. The Lib Dems have a decent representation on the city council and are doing some campaigning, but would probably be happy just increasing their vote share. The opening odds at Smarkets suggest there is about an 85% chance that Labour will gain the seat on Thursday.